Athen

The Jewish Museum of Greece

The idea of building a Jewish Museum of Greece was first
conceived in the 1970’s by members of the Jewish Community of
Athens, who offered every kind of assistance towards the
realisation of this dream. The Museum was first established in
1977 and housed in a small room next to the city’s synagogue.
It housed objects salvaged from WW II, whether artefacts,
documents and manuscripts of the 19th and 20th centuries, or
the jewellery of the Jews of Thrace that had been seized by the
Bulgarians in 1943. The latter had been returned to the Greek
government after the abdication of the Bulgarian king and the
establishment of a communist regime in the countr.

The Museum’s collections

The Museum’s collections include more than eight thousand
original artifacts, testifying to more than 23 centuries of
Jewish presence in Greece.

Besides a few objects which Asher Moissis,
president of the Jewish Community of Athens, had collected
after the war, the core of the initial collection was made up
of items that had been returned to Greece by the Bulgarian
government, after the establishment of a communist regime in
that country. These included personal effects, jewellery,
domestic items, synagogual objects and documents, which
belonged to the Jews of Eastern Macedonia and Thrace and were
confiscated after 1941, when the area fell in the Bulgarian
zone of occupation. The confiscated items had been meticulously
recorded and became the first significant body of artifacts of
the collection.